Interviewing for a RedHat Admin position

[Scarpozzi]

I got a call today from another IT shop that's looking for a RedHat Admin. I work in the same industry (higher ed), but deal predominantly with SUSE Linux Enterprise, Netware, SAN and VMware administration. Since my linux experience is rooted in SLES, I rely more on YAST than traditional console commands in Linux. When I attempted to use console commands in Linux, I was always shooting myself in the foot because the system was specifically geared to use YAST.

Do any Red Hat guys have some advice of a good document that I can use to brush up on my terminology, etc before going to this interview? I need to get a grasp on what they'll be looking for and what I need to fill the gap. Thanks,

-Scar

 

[Platypus]

ygpm

 

[TheCanuck]

Do you know which versions of Redhat they mainly use? RHEL4 or RHEL5? There are a few changes between the two such as RHEL4 uses up2date for package management and RHEL5 uses yum.

Typing system-config<tab> will give you a bunch of config options via the gui. Most of what you need to do though should probably be through the command line.

Here's a quick tutorial that goes through some of the differences between Redhat and Suse:

http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIA...xTutorialSysAdmin.html


Yast simplifies things a great deal, but makes your skills with the command line a little rusty. A few days of hacking away though and you should be up to speed. Might want to download a copy of CentOS and set it up in either a VMware session or on an older box to play around with. CentOS is the virtually identical to Redhat but free and without the red fedora all over the place.

 

[Scarpozzi]

I installed RHEL 4 today on a VM. I'll be playing with it tomorrow. Tonight I'm going through some Linux Administration training videos I have (about 20 CDs worth) to see what I can pickup.

True. YAST has basically robbed me of the command line stuff that I should know inside and out... Since I do so much Netware, I'm geared toward it more than linux, but have been wanting to do Linux Administration for the last year or so. I'm just wanting to move near my hometown and Netware positions don't exist there. This Linux position is also a rare find. Windows is the dominant OS.

Luckily, I'm used to doing configuration file administration with applications such as Apache and Tomcat. Netware is also configured from a couple of primary config files, so this won't be a huge jump to get up to speed. I'm just trying to cover my bases before the interview.